


An Empty Grave Makes a Person Whole

by spookyserpent



Series: Dying is Easy, Living is So Much Harder [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Finding Peace, Found Family, I love Nile, Immortal Husbands, M/M, She’s the Baby of the Group, accepting death, talk of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:47:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25247113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyserpent/pseuds/spookyserpent
Summary: Her mom steps away from her brother’s arms, touching Nile’s headstone briefly. She leans down, places a gentle kiss and then turns, making her way back towards the car. Her brother pats her headstone and he too leaves. Nile knows they will heal. They have done it before after their dad died. They can do it again.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Dying is Easy, Living is So Much Harder [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1829095
Comments: 26
Kudos: 618





	An Empty Grave Makes a Person Whole

**Author's Note:**

> Can be read as a continuation from Death, like Love, Waits for No One, or as a separate fic. 
> 
> I just love Nile and the relationship between Nicky and Joe. I want to give Booker a hug, okay? He’s been through a lot. Andy, too. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Her mom is shaking, sobbing into her brother’s shoulder so violently that he is barely holding the both of them up. They stand by her grave, name etched into the stone, and Nile doesn’t try to remove her tears. She stays, sitting on the bench furthest from their line of sight, and watches them. 

There is a burning in her chest and she knows that grief has already set in. This will be the last time she sees them. Maybe Nicky was right, she shouldn’t have come. This feels too much like her dad all over again. 

She’s so focused on committing their faces to memory - she can still hear Andy mentioning the lost memory of her sisters, her mother - that she reacts too late when a man sits beside her. 

“Easy,” Booker says, eyes hollow and lips pulled tight into a self-deprecating smile. “It is not as though I can kill you, anyway.” 

Nile shrugs, eyes flickering between her family and him. “I thought we couldn’t meet up for a century?” 

The laugh he releases is one so broken, it catches her attention, pulling her to look at him fully. For an immortal, he appears to be more of a walking corpse. His hair is unkept and unwashed, at least three day old stubble on his chin and cheeks, his clothes splattered with what can only be alcohol. He looks like shit. She tells him as much and his laugh turns slightly more amused. 

“Don’t tell Joe.” He says, leaning back, now eyeing her family. “I heard about the funeral.” 

“And you decided that gave you a reason to drop by?” 

He runs a hand down his face, fingers drifting into his coat pocket to pull out his flask. “Unlike the others, death is something I can understand.” 

She remembers then, the talk of his sons, of how they turned on him when they knew he could heal and yet he couldn’t save them. 

“This is the best way,” she says, a lump in her throat. She wipes the tears away with her sleeve. “This is the only way. I don’t- I don’t want to put them through any unnecessary pain.” 

He nods. “They will heal from this.” He takes a sip, pockets the flask, reaches out so that he’s holding her hand. “As will you.” 

“You haven’t.” Nile doesn’t know why she says it but she does because she’s right. Booker sold them out because he wanted to die, nearly killing Andy in the process. 

“No,” he inclines his head in agreement, “but I am young. In a few centuries, I may yet forget their names, their deaths a lesser burden on me.” 

Her mom steps away from her brother’s arms, touching Nile’s headstone briefly. She leans down, places a gentle kiss and then turns, making her way back towards the car. Her brother pats her headstone and he too leaves. Nile knows they will heal. They have done it before after their dad died. They can do it again. 

Booker stands. “I will leave to give you some time.”

“I won’t tell them.” She says to his retreating back, standing so that she can make her way to her own grave. 

He freezes and the laugh he releases this time isn’t as hollow but much more pain-filled. “They know I am here. I can’t resist a funeral.” Booker looks at her then, a searching, enquiring look. “It may be different for you. You don’t have to end up like me. Immortality can be a beautiful thing. You simply have to find what that is.” 

Nicky and Joe come to mind. Two immortals inevitably linked through bloodshed, circumstance and an all-consuming love. 

“See you in a century,” she calls and he waves a hand back to her, disappearing between the trees. 

Nile makes her way over to her grave. She doesn’t know how Copley did it but she’s here. Her final resting place. The shots had been fired, the hands saluted, the flag laid to rest. Underneath her feet, an empty coffin stays. One she should’ve been in. 

Her fingers run along the edge of the gravestone, eyes falling closed. She should be dead. Very dead. Yet she breathes and feels the tidal wave of pain come crashing down. 

By the time she dies for the last time, it may be thousands of years in the future, her mom, her dad, her brother, empty faces long forgotten in her mind. She will not be given a military send-off. 

She will just be Nile Freeman - if that even is the name she dies with - immortal, now turned freshly mortal, now dead. 

“It can be both a blessing and a curse.” Joe speaks from beside her and she startles, hands quickly raising into fists at her chest. He doesn’t flinch, just raises his eyebrows at her before dropping his gaze to her headstone. “Immortality. A double-edged sword.” 

At her other side, Nicky sighs, arms crossed as he looks across the field of similar graves. Filled graves, her brain unhelpfully reminds her. 

“You can experience things, go anywhere, be anyone, learn everything.” Nicky adds. “But you will always feel pain, loss.”

“And be alone.” Nile replies, looking at both of them individually. 

“Nile-“ Joe tries and she shakes her head, takes two steps back, away from her grave. 

“I’ve seen Booker, Andy. I didn’t meet the love of my life in the crusades like you two did. Everyone I love will die.” She can’t look at them because the truth burns inside of her, freezing her heart. 

She will never grow old, will never love someone and push them around in wheelchair, dying quietly in the night beside them. That is not her life, will never be her life. Not anymore.

“But we won’t,” Nicky says and she is so thankful that he doesn’t try to reach for her, doesn’t try to placate her. “We can be your family, if you will have us. Joe and I,” he looks at Joe and the smile is so sweet that Nile feels like she’s at her grandmother’s again, hearing the tale of how she met her husband, “we were lucky.”

“We still are.” Joe adds, resting against her headstone. “But we didn’t have to be, Nile. Nicolo could’ve continued to kill me, if he wished. He could’ve ran from me. Frankly, I was bored of it. The continuous killing.” 

“As was I.” 

“We stopped, though. After what? Five days, wasn’t it?” Nicky nods, arms dropping as one hand absently touches his side. The look that crosses Joe is one of pain and anguish and Nile comes to the sudden realisation that they may have been in love for centuries, but their past mistakes still sit heavily on them both. 

“What Joe is trying to say,” Nicky says, “is that we chose each other. We didn’t have to. We could’ve continued the mindless slaughter of one another. But we stopped.”

“Maybe it was the hunger or the exhaustion. Maybe it was because we realised we were not doing the other any harm. Maybe it was because, even then, we knew fate had thrown us together.” Joe stands, reaches his hand across to grip the side of Nicky’s neck. A simple touch, filled with so much affection. Nile couldn’t look away if she tried. 

“You are correct,” Joe continues, dropping his hand and turning to face her. “We will never understand Andy’s pain, the loneliness she experienced in the centuries she searched for someone like her. We will never understand Booker’s loss, the anguish he can never escape from and is haunted by ever since he found out he would be burying his sons, when they were supposed to be burying him.” 

“But we dream of each other for a reason, we find each other so that we don’t have to be alone.” Nicky finishes for Joe, in that seamless way, as though they can read the other’s thoughts perfectly. 

“I chose this man, to lay beside me despite the days he spent killing me, to eat with me, to huddle with me in the cold.” 

Nicky leans forward, a quick kiss, a hasty comment in Italian that Nile can’t understand until he smiles at her and translates, “and I chose him.” This time, he gently grips her shoulder and she sags into the pressure, thankful for it. “I will continue to choose him. Just like Andy chose us, just like Booker did. We are a family, Nile.”

“I may want the bastard to suffer,” Joe comments, off-handedly, only to backtrack at Nicky’s soft hiss of his name, “but the second the century comes to pass, I’ll welcome him back.” 

He mutters something else, to which Nicky hip-checks him, another hiss of his name falling from his lips. 

Nicky turns to her, squeezes her shoulder once, twice and then drops his hand. “We are here for you, Nile. You will never be alone. We understand if you want to spend some decades away, to come to terms with this. We’ll wait.”

Joe winks at him. “We’re good at that.” 

“We all know that.” Andy calls and Nile turns to find her watching them by the bench she had previously sat on. 

Nile holds a hand up to her heart, pounding loudly in her chest. “I’m buying you all bells.” 

Andy grins at her while Joe and Nicky laugh behind her. Andy gestures to the grave, “do you need more time?” 

Nile takes a moment to look at her name, carved into the stone. This is not her final resting place. She should be dead. 

But she’s not. She may never understand why she is immortal and the loss of her family may never leave her but she’s seen what they can do. Copley’s wall was evident of how many lives they’ve touched, saved and taken. 

Nile joined the Marines for her dad, to honour his memory. She served because people needed her, they needed to be saved, protected. She died under orders and survived because for some reason she can’t be killed. 

One thing she knows for certain, is that she is not the only one. She thinks of Booker’s hollow eyes; looks up at Nicky and Joe, standing close enough to brush against one another every time they breathe; turns to Andy, newly mortal and still one hundred percent ready to wade into battle so long as it can do good. 

She feels content, at peace. She will miss her mom, her brother and losing them will always hurt as much as dying does. That does not mean she will stop loving though. A piece of her begins to bloom at the thought of being accepted as part of this family. She knows they will protect her, will fight for her, will love her. 

She may never have what Nicky and Joe have but she knows she will never be truly alone. Her heart thaws. 

Nile grins at Joe. “You mentioned something about Malta?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! 
> 
> I want a sequel and if that consists of them all just being domestic: So Be It. 
> 
> I love them. :)


End file.
